


The Fine Line Between Life And Death

by flawedamythyst



Series: Lines [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A Hopeful Ending Rather Than A Happy One, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Angsty Back Story, Ghosts, Hufflepuff Bucky, Hufflepuff Clint, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 15:17:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19396828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/pseuds/flawedamythyst
Summary: On Clint's last night at Hogwarts, he skips out on the party to hang out with a grumpy ghost instead.





	The Fine Line Between Life And Death

At some point in the last six months, Clint’s shoulders had got too wide for the secret passage, but he wasn’t letting that stop him. If he had to get a little scuffed up to get out to the balcony that wrapped around the top of one of Hogwarts’s shorter towers, then so be it.

He’d first found the secret passage back in his second year and he’d never found another way to the balcony. Given Hogwarts’s strange and largely incomprehensible architecture, it was entirely possible there wasn’t one. There were times when Clint was pretty sure the builders of the castle had been high as fuck on pixie dust the whole time they were building it.

The light of his wand illuminated the brick wall at the end of the passage and he paused, standing sideways so he wouldn't get wedged in place, and tapped on the sequence of bricks that would cause it to sink down into the floor with a heavy rumble. He squeezed out through it and took a deep breath of the evening air, rubbing at his shoulder where he’d scrapped it against the stonework.

“Bucky?” he called, glancing around.

“Up here.”

Clint turned and looked up. Bucky was perched on the edge of the pointed tower roof, the grey tiles faintly visible through his body, glowing in the soft light of the sunset.

“Hey!” said Clint, grinning up at him.

“Good evening,” said Bucky. “Aren’t you meant to be at a party?”

Clint rolled his eyes. “As if I was going to spend my last evening at Hogwarts without coming to see you.”

“To say goodbye,” said Bucky heavily, then slipped forward off the roof, slowly floating down to stand on the balcony next to Clint.

When his voice had that desolate note in it, there was nothing Clint wanted more than to reach out to take his hand or touch his shoulder, anything to make him feel better, but he knew from bitter experience that all that did was send a cold shiver down his spine and piss Bucky off. He didn’t much like having his incorporeality pointed out to him.

“Tony Stark was bringing out bottles of firewhisky and talking about Truth or Dare when I left,” said Clint. “I think I’m better off up here.”

Bucky snorted. “I guess after last time you played Truth or Dare, that’s a wise choice.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” said Clint. “I told you. If someone had done something about the woodworm in this place in the last thousand years, that beam would totally have held my weight.”

“Sure, the beam breaking wasn’t your fault,” said Bucky, “but taking the dare in the first place definitely was. You should have just taken a truth.”

Clint rolled his eyes but didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that Natasha had worked out a few months ago that he had a crush on someone and was just biding her time, waiting for her chance to find out who. There was no way he was opening himself up by taking a truth, not when it meant explaining that when he disappeared off by himself every other evening, he wasn’t studying, he was hanging out with a ghost.

Clint had found the secret passage up to the tower entirely by chance in his second year, when he was on the run from some older kids who thought it was funny to bully him over his Muggle hearing aids. He'd ducked into a little-used side passage to avoid them and found a large portrait of a dog, who had sat up excitedly when he’d seen he had company.

Even though the dog was only oil and canvas, Clint hadn’t been able to resist reaching out to stroke his ears, which had made the dog wriggle with joy, and then the portrait clicked open to reveal a door.

Of course Clint had climbed through. He’d been anticipating all kinds of things at the other end, but a balcony jammed on the side of a tower and the grumpy ghost of a boy hadn’t been on the list. Bucky had been pretty rude to Clint when he’d first turned up, but Clint had taken one look at his Hufflepuff tie, the same as his, and known they were going to be friends, even if it took him some time to wear him down.

“Okay, we both know the truth is that I just wanted an excuse to climb across the ceiling of the Great Hall,” said Clint. “I mean, come on! Who doesn’t want to leave school with that kind of legacy? The only pupil with his initials carved on the highest joist of the Great Hall! They’ll be talking about me for years.”

“The only pupil with a frequent flyer card for the Hospital Wing,” muttered Bucky, but Clint could see the upward tilt of his mouth that meant his grumpiness was faked. Clint was pretty sure that if they’d been the normal kind of friends, the kind who were both alive, Bucky would have been right there with him as he’d climbed up the roof beams. “Please tell me you’re going to put effort in to not turning up at St Mungos as often as you do the Hospital Wing here?”

Clint shrugged. “I mean, I’m going to be playing Quidditch professionally, so let’s not make any bets.” 

The Montrose Magpies had sent an owl last week, offering him a spot on their second team that he’d snapped up immediately. Playing quidditch professionally had been only one of two or three dreams he’d had for his future before he’d realised it was the one that made it most likely he’d be able to come back to Hogwarts as an adult. Natasha thought he was nuts for not going with her to train as an auror, but it had been the easiest decision Clint had ever made. He wasn’t going to just walk away from six years of friendship of Bucky and leave him to hang around alone up on the balcony, not when he could come back as a teacher and keep him company for a good few decades longer.

“Oh god,” said Bucky, despairingly. “You’re going to be dead within a week.”

“If I am, that just means I can come haunt this place with you,” said Clint, grinning at him. 

Bucky glared at him. “No,” he growled, and his eyes did the thing that only happened when he was really angry, going black as shadows darkened around him.

“Oh, fine,” said Clint, keeping his tone light, because sometimes when Bucky got too angry, the shadows took him over completely and he disappeared into them and didn’t come back for a few days. Clint wanted to hang out with him tonight, not drive him away. “I guess I’ll just have to come and visit you without dying.”

The shadows around Bucky lightened, but his scowl didn’t lessen. “You’re not going to be a student any more,” he reminded Clint.

“I bet I can still find a way to come visit,” said Clint. “I know all the secret passages, I can easily apparate to Hogsmeade and then sneak up here to see you.”

Bucky shook his head. “No, you need to move on. Only one of us is trapped up here.”

He had on the same miserable, lonely scowl that he’d had on the first time Clint had stumbled up here, and which Clint had spent as much of his time at Hogwarts chasing off his face as he could. He’d taken to coming up a couple of times a week, even in the winter when the balcony was freezing cold and right in the path of the wind, which at least meant he’d got really good at heating charms. Over the years, Bucky had become pretty much his best friend other than Natasha, who was more like a sister anyway. A long-suffering older sister.

And then Clint had reached a certain age and realised the feelings he had for Bucky didn’t stop at friendship and, well. That was just making the idea of leaving Hogwarts, and Bucky, even harder.

“It’s only a few years, then I’ll be back,” said Clint. “I told you, I’ve got a plan. A couple of years playing Quidditch professionally, then I’ll be qualified to come here as Flying Instructor. Professor Hooch is only a few years from retirement.”

Bucky shook his head. “And I told you that planning your career, your whole life, around being able to spend time with me is stupid.”

Clint just shrugged, pulling himself up to sit on the balcony wall. “Who says I wouldn’t want to be Flying Instructor even if you weren’t here? Seems like a pretty cushy job, really. You only have to teach the first years, coach the teams and referee the occasional match. Much better than most jobs.”

Bucky floated over to settle next to Clint, close enough that Clint could feel the chill of his essence seeping through his robes. He didn’t move away.

“I swear, you’re too bloody stubborn,” Bucky muttered. “Just another bloody stubborn blond guy. How the hell do I keep ending up with them?”

Bucky never talked about when he’d been alive. Clint held his breath for a moment, hoping for more information about other stubborn blonds he had known, but Bucky didn’t say anything else.

Clint thought he knew who he was talking about, anyway. Bucky hadn’t told him his full name until the night of Clint’s sixteenth birthday, when he’d come up here very late, after his birthday party. Tony had snuck firewhisky into that one as well, and Clint had been drunk enough to open up to Bucky more than he ever had before, sitting against the stone wall and staring up at the moon as he whispered about his dad and how he really lost his hearing, and how his brother had stopped talking to him once he’d got his Hogwarts letter. 

It had felt like they were the only two people in the world, all alone at the top of a tower, on a balcony that no one else even knew existed. Bucky must have felt it too, because he’d opened up enough to tell Clint his full name, and that he’d fallen from the balcony on another moonlit night, back in 1943.

As soon as Clint had had ‘James Buchanan Barnes’, he’d gone looking, eventually finding an old school bulletin about the tragic loss of James Barnes and his friend Steve Rogers, who had disappeared somewhere on the grounds and never been found. Clint had looked over the edge of the tower the next time he was up there, down at the long drop all the way into the lake below, and wondered if Steve Rogers was down there as well, and why he wasn’t haunting the balcony with Bucky.

He hadn’t asked though. Bucky had made it clear after that night that he wasn’t going to talk to Clint about his death, and any time Clint pushed, he just disappeared and left him alone.

“Just lucky, I guess,” Clint said now, rather than mention any of that.

Bucky huffed a sigh. “You get that I’m not going to be getting any older, right? If you come back in a few years, I’m still gonna be a teenager.”

Clint shrugged. “I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said. “You look like a teenager, sure, but you’ve been dead, what? Seventy years? Not proper dead though, you’ve been around for every one of those years, even if you don’t look any older. If anything, you’re a geriatric. It doesn’t matter how many decades I spend teaching here, you’re always going to be older than me.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched. “You can’t- Clint! You can’t arrange your whole life around me, I’m not-” He took a deep breath as Clint just smirked at him, because Bucky didn’t get a choice on this. If Clint wanted to make sure that he never had to leave Bucky alone up here, then he would. Right up until Bucky said that he didn’t actually like Clint, and he didn’t want him around, but Bucky had never even come close to that, even during the arguments they’d had about Clint’s plan to come back to Hogwarts.

“Fuck,” muttered Bucky and he looked away, out over the lake, with a pained frown that Clint wanted to smooth off his face. Damn, and it was such a pretty face, too. 

“I’m not dead,” said Bucky eventually, after a pause long enough for Clint to get completely distracted by looking at him.

Clint blinked at him. “What?” he said, then looked Bucky over again. “Come on, that’s not- You’re a ghost. I can _see through you_.”

Bucky looked back at him, and the empty look on his face made Clint’s heart freeze cold. “Doesn’t mean I’m dead.”

“What the hell else does it mean?” asked Clint. “You told me you fell off the tower, how the hell wouldn’t you be dead? That was seventy years ago!”

“Yeah,” agreed Bucky. “Seventy years ago. And I didn’t so much fall, as was pushed.”

“What?” croaked Clint. “What the hell?”

Bucky took a very deep breath, fixing his gaze on the stone floor of the balcony. “I came up here with a guy I thought I could trust, who’d made friends with me precisely so that he could lure me up here. He hit me with a stupify and I fell over the edge, but he had friends waiting for me. They caught me on a cushioning spell.”

“Bucky,” said Clint slowly, sick dread souring his stomach. “Bucky, you’re dead. You’re a ghost.”

“I’m a ghost, maybe,” said Bucky, clenching his hands in his lap, “but I’m not dead. Have you ever heard of a shadowghast?”

Clint shook his head.

“No reason you should have,” said Bucky. “They’re created through the kind of necromancy that was banned centuries ago and that’s been mostly forgotten.” He ran a pale hand through his hair. “The necromancer puts some poor bastard into a magical stasis that keeps them as close to death as you can get without actually crossing over. If they do it right, they can control their spirit, sending it to do whatever they want.”

Horror was sinking into Clint’s chest. “Like what?”

Bucky shrugged. “Killing people, mostly. A spirit can’t be kept out by walls or doors, or even most wards. And when it kills someone, when _I_ kill someone, there’s no sign of what’s happened. It just looks like a heart attack, so no one investigates.”

“Holy shit,” said Clint, staring at him. “That’s- You’re one of them? A shadowghast?”

Bucky nodded, still not meeting Clint’s eyes. “That’s why you can’t come back here, Clint. I’m not some tragic accident, I’m a monster.” His voice caught in his throat, and he looked at Clint with heartbroken eyes. “You need to leave tomorrow, and never look back.”

Yeah, Clint wasn’t paying attention to any of that. If some bastard was making Bucky do horrible things, there was no way Clint was going to just walk away and leave him.

“Why the fuck didn’t you say something sooner?” he asked instead, jumping up off the wall so that he could pace. “Who’s this necromancer?” He frowned, thinking about the article again. “Was it Steve Rogers?”

Bucky gave him a startled look. “What? No! Steve wouldn’t do anything like that, he was my best friend, why the hell would you think that?”

“He disappeared at the same time you did,” Clint pointed out.

Bucky shook his head. “No, that was- I don’t know what happened to him, I was busy being the centre of a necromantic ritual, but there was no way he had anything to do with this.”

“Okay,” said Clint, “then who did? Who is this bastard, and where does he have your body? There must be a way to reverse it and get you back.”

Bucky flowed upright, reaching out for Clint but not getting close enough to pass through him. “No! No, Clint, he’s too powerful. If he knows you know about him, about me, he’ll send me after you, and I’ll be forced to kill you.” He hesitated, then added in a low, emotional voice. “Please, I can’t be the reason you die.”

“You won’t be,” said Clint, moving towards him and stopping just short of Bucky’s hands. God, he wanted to be able to take them so much. “Hey, listen. I’m not about to go getting myself killed just when I’ve found out there’s a chance to get you your life back. I’ll get help. It’s not like what he’s doing is even close to legal, I can get Aurors after him.”

Bucky shook his head. “He’s high up in the Ministry. He’s spent decades weaving his webs, using me to kill off anyone who gets in his way,” he said. “He’s got ears in the Aurors. You couldn’t trust anyone to help.”

“I can’t leave you like this either,” said Clint. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to think. “Okay, I can’t trust the Aurors, but Natasha’s a lot scarier than any of them and I can trust her. And Bruce, he’s a good guy, but fucking terrifying in a fight. Tony’s annoying, but he’s a genius, I bet he’d have some good ideas. Tell me who the necromancer is and I’ll go and talk to them first, I swear, and Natasha will come up with a plan that won’t get anyone killed. We can get you out.”

Bucky hesitated, looking torn. “I can’t risk you,” he said, in a rough whisper.

Clint shook his head, feeling tears well up and blinking them back. “Please, Bucky,” he said. “Please let me free you. Don’t you want to be able to live again?”

Bucky took a deep breath, looking down at Clint’s hands and then reaching out to hover his through them. “I want to be able to touch you,” he said, so softly that Clint’s hearing aids almost didn’t catch it, even with the magical tune-up Tony had given them.

Holy shit, did Bucky mean that how it sounded? Did he want to touch Clint the way Clint wanted to touch him? “I want you to be able to touch me too,” he said, just as softly, heart fizzing with anticipation.

Bucky caught his breath, looking up at him with fierce eyes. “You can’t get hurt,” he said. “There’s no point to coming back to life if you’re not there.”

Clint nodded. “I promise,” he said. “I’ll be super-careful. I’ll listen to everything Natasha says, and take precautions, and not go clambering about roof rafters. Just, please. Tell me who this fucker is.”

Bucky moved in closer to him, close enough that his essence passed into Clint’s body, chilling his skin. “His name is Alexander Pierce,” he said, breathing the words out so quietly that Clint felt them rather than heard them.

Clint knew that name. He stared at Bucky with wide eyes. “The head of the Wizengamot?”

Bucky nodded. “He’s rotten all the way through,” he said. “I’m not his only dark secret. You have to be careful.”

Clint nodded, mind whirling. Alexander Pierce was the youngest Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot ever, and was widely tipped to be the next Minister for Magic. He’d risen to his current position after the last Chief Warlock had died suddenly of a-

Huh.

Of a heart attack. Clint looked at Bucky with dawning realisation. “Erasmus Scrivens,” he said.

Bucky nodded. “Pierce sent me after him,” he said, sounding choked. “He was in his study. I reached into his chest and stopped his heart. He was- he was terrified.” For a moment, he sounded as if he were going to cry, but instead he took a deep breath and fixed Clint with a look. “I’m a monster,” he said. “Alexander Pierce made me into a monster. Please, even if you can’t bring me back, you have to end it, Clint. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

“We’ll rescue you,” said Clint, because he wasn’t going to contemplate anything else. “I swear, Bucky. I’ll set you free.”

Bucky nodded, and he actually looked like he believed Clint. “Good,” he said, “because I really want to be able to do this for real.” He leaned in close to Clint, and his mouth pressed over Clint’s, feather-soft and cold as ice.

Clint froze still, barely breathing as the implications rushed through him. “Me too,” he said, as Bucky moved back. “God, Bucky. Me too.”

Bucky found a smile, shaky and lopsided but there. “Then you definitely need to be careful,” he said. “If you get hurt being reckless about this-”

“No fear,” said Clint, grinning back at him. “I told you. No recklessness, just getting you out.”

“Good,” said Bucky, and drifted backwards, to the edge of the balcony. “Go on then.”

Clint ducked his head and threw a vague attempt at a salute at him, still unable to keep the grin off his face because _Bucky wanted to kiss him_ , then opened the secret passage again and darted through, heedless of the stone rubbing at his shoulders as he squeezed through. He had to get to Nat, they had to make a plan to take Pierce down and get Bucky out, and then he’d be able to kiss him for real. He could do this.


End file.
